Well, without Columbus, I wouldn’t be here, so I’ll be happy to celebrate him. He ranks as one of only three people to have their own federal holiday. (Four if you still call “President’s Day” by the old name: “Washington’s Birthday”.)

A bit harsh. Columbus didn’t personally do any of those things.
What he did do it discover North America (from a Euro perspective, granted) when the odds were against him. It is fine to acknowledge the negative, but to focus on the negative exclusively is a bit overboard.
Happy Columbus Day, US!

And helped to bring hordes of lovely treasures to the new world. See: Gold, glory, honor, a greater understanding of the world, syphilis… But don’t worry, Columbus believed in sharing. He gave the natives some pretty wild times of their own – hard labor for no pay, disease, contempt, refusal to convert to any religion because it’s “wrong” to enslave Catholics, you know, that whole shebang. Hip-hip-hoorah for Columbus Day!

“In 1400 and 92 Columbus sailed the ocean blue” he ran smack into the (islands off) the new world on his way to India, and *still* maintained it *was* India – thus ‘Indians’. (Perhaps ‘indians’ better reflects the European view.)

Guess for Chris, it was a small, small,world after all. (To his credit, at least he thought it was round.) My (male)pastor recently mentioned that perhaps Columbus started the ‘won’t stop for directions’ thing, but noted that unless you count seagulls or fish, who’d he have to ask?!
I think Columbus did start a tradition, but it’s the ‘I know exactly where I am, and this *has* to be the right destination.’ thing.

It took subsequent trips by Columbus and a multitude of others to thoroughly reconnoiter, report on, and rape this ‘New World’ (capitalized by greed).

Jane “bring hordes of lovely treasures to the new world. See: Gold” Gold? They was plenty of gold here already.
Chris “discover North America (from a Euro perspective, granted)” What about the Basques and the Wikings, they’re not European. The best way I heard it describe is that he was the last one to discover America.

Get over yourselves. This side of the world was going to be found, if not by Columbus, then by the English in the next couple hundred years. Yes the people were enslaved, yes disease was brought, unwittingly, to the ‘new world’. Yes bad things happened. This discussion seems to be forgetting the good that was brought about by the ‘discovery’ of the Americas. Namely that We are Here. This point in human history is the result of the successes and failures of those that come before.

Why is it necessary to feel guilty about what happened 500 years ago? We can’t change what went down back then. Let’s figure out what to do Now to make life better for those around us and around the world. (Hint: bitching and moaning about Christopher Columbus is not it…)

Exactly. And the christian viewpoint of “My way is right, and anyone who disagrees shall be forced into obeisance or killed.” was given to a whole new continent.

And ZZ, I hope that you realize that it is the ones who celebrate Columbus that have no true place here and it is you who should “have your bags packed and soon depart for England”, as the indigenous peoples who were murdered (yes, murdered, in a near genocidal sense) had cultures of their (our) own long before he “discovered” our lands.

I didn’t say that there was no bloodshed before Columbus. (And as for the term indigenous, it can also be used to refer to the original people who populate a land.)

However, the reasons for the bloodshed were not religious conversion and gold.

My main problem with Columbus is the way people seem to idolize him for “finding the Americas”. And so few want to see the truth of it that it was not so much finding as it was conquering and merciless slaughter.

> It is fine to acknowledge the negative, but to focus on the negative exclusively is a bit overboard.

Ah, but it IS entirely in-line with the absolute and imbalanced demonization of Western Culture, which is one aspect of the Liberal Mantra.

When you make a “based on a true story” movie like “Amistad” and end it with the central enslaved black man “going home”, instead of heading off to the West Indies ***to become a slave trader himself***, you ignore that it wasn’t just The West who took part in slavery.

When you focus on Nazi Germany’s slaughter of 6 million Jews, while ignoring the USSR’s slaughter of 20 million peasants (including Jews and other dissidents) or Red China’s slaughter of OVER 50 million peasants, dissidents, and academics) you ignore that it’s just just The West who slaughters people.

When you call attention to the slaughter in Darfur, while casually ignoring that all parties involved are mostly Islamic, you ignore the dangers of Islamic Fanaticism.

There are lots of things that the West did which aren’t particularly honorable and decent by modern standards. But that’s the problem right there — **by modern standards** — you don’t — CAN’T — honestly gauge any culture by what it has done in a hardscrabble world where it’s entirely a kill-or-be-killed environment using modern standards.

And it says ONE HELL OF A LOT about the essential decency of The West when you grasp that “modern standards” are themselves THE RESULT of The West’s own self-analysis about what was good in its own culture and what was bad, and are an attempt to remove the bad from its future.

Guilt? No. WE didn’t do it, we’re the decendants of those who did it. If you murder someone, but get away with it until you are dead, does that mean your great grandchild should go to jail for that murder? No? Why not, if GUILT transcends generations?

But hey, if your goal is to destroy Western Culture, which actually created those softened standards you want to judge them by, then more power to ya.

> “In 1400 and 92 Columbus sailed the ocean blue” he ran smack into the (islands off) the new world on his way to India, and *still* maintained it *was* India – thus ‘Indians’. (Perhaps ‘indians’ better reflects the European view.)

…demonstrating that you are one abysmally clueless mofo idiot.

The term “Indian” did not refer to “India” (which wasn’t called “India” at that time, genius, even in English, which, AFAIK, ***wasn’t the language of the Spanish Empire*** — but hey, who cares about the bleeding obvious, right?).

Columbus wrote — IN LATIN — that the indiginous peoples he encountered were “In Dios” (under God) — he believed them to be living in much the same state as Adam and Eve. Hence the term becoming “Indian”.

And Columbus, by any standard, did not bring the rapacious oppression of the people to the Americas, that was brought by many who followed him.

But hey, Global Warming forbid that facts get in the way of your clueless Anti-Western Cultural Rant.

“the absolute and imbalanced demonization of Western Culture, which is one aspect of the Liberal Mantra.” Oh come on. The Liberal point of view is not to ignore our faults, just because others have faults to. It is the continuation of “The West’s own self-analysis about what was good in its own culture and what was bad.”

“The term “Indian” did not refer to “India”.” Of course not. And this isn’t why we call them the West Indies.

Amadeo, Columbus took a few sample natives to the Queen, not the king, who had sponsored his mission. And the Spanish queen was furious and said that Columbus had no business enslaving or kidnapping *her subjects*.

The Spaniards of the time weren’t exactly any saints, but they treated the American continent like an extension of Spain, with all its consequences, from day one. South America didn’t have colonies. It had “viceroyalty”, “sub-kingdoms”. There was no concept of citizen because it was an absolutist monarchy, but a plebeian person in Madrid was legally the same as a plebeian in Peru.

If you read Columbus logbook, or if you are familiar with the discussions on cartography in the XVth century in Europe, they are actually talking about India (aka the subcontinent), which was known in this way since Roman times. Columbus miscalculated the diameter of the planet, thus thinking that India and Cathay (China) were approximately where Mexico and the Caribbean are. When he first arrived to the Bahamas and Cuba, he thought that he was arriving to the Cipango (Japan) Islands, a previous stage to the eastern-most part of Asia.

… I really thought this was more “Columbus Day marks the beginning of some really awful shit, so why do we celebrate?” rather than “Columbus did it all himself!”
And “this is shit, so we shouldn’t celebrate,” not, “this is shit, so feel personally culpable RIGHT NOW!”

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This site is a little project that lets me make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math.